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Are the Mideast borders crumbling?

As the fallout from the Syrian war spreads, some wonder if colonial borders are being wiped out and states based on religious identity are being created.

An undated photo of T.E. Lawrence, a British officer who played a crucial role in the mideast during World War I.

This is a copy of the actual map signed by Mark Sykes and Francois Georges-Picot, May 8, 1916. The blue areas (parts of modern Turkey and Syria) were French-controlled, and France's influence was extended through the area marked 'A.' The red area (primarily parts of modern Iraq and Kuwait) was British controlled, with their control extended through the 'B' zone.
(The National Archives (U.K.))

On Nov. 20, 1917, as the First World War raged, T.E. Lawrence, a British colonial officer, travelled to the town of Deraa in modern Syria to survey the rail lines. Lawrence, a key player in the revolt in which Arabs were fighting Ottoman Turkish rule and sabotaging the Hejaz Railway, was dressed in Arab clothing to stay under the radar. Together with his escort and their camels, Lawrence walked along the train lines. But he was captured by a Turkish officer.

What happened next has been debated by historians for 97 years. Was Lawrence really stripped, raped by the local governor and whipped by guards as he famously claimed in his memoir Seven Pillars of Wisdom?

He claimed that he was flogged, his wrists cracked, but he climbed out of a window to escape and made a 110-kilometre journey on horseback.

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It is improbable, so perhaps the truth was somewhere in between, Scott Anderson writes in an absorbing new book, Lawrence in Arabia.

Maybe Lawrence surrendered to his attackers’ advances to avoid torture, Anderson writes, citing a 1924 letter. “For fear of being hurt, or rather to earn five minutes respite from a pain which drove me mad, I gave away the only possession we are born into the world with: our bodily integrity,” Lawrence wrote to a friend.

Whatever really happened, Lawrence’s version and his adventures in the Middle East in the dying days of the Ottoman Empire has become the stuff of legend, and immortalized in the 1962 film starring Peter O’Toole.

But Lawrence’s exploits in Deraa seem instantly irrelevant considering the town is now associated with a new infamy. In March 2011, a group of adolescent boys scribbled on the town’s walls “the people want the fall of the regime,” echoing the chants of ordinary Arabs rising up against their despotic rulers across the region. The boys’ arrest and torture set off waves of national protest against President Bashar Assad and provoked a war seemingly without end, a sectarian conflict that is destabilizing Syria’s neighbours.

Fragile Iraq, still reeling from the 2003 U.S. invasion, is hit by a resurgence of extremism because groups such as Al Qaeda are forging links with factions across the border, Nickolay Mladenov, the top UN official in Iraq warned the UN Security Council recently.

Jordan’s King Abdullah is struggling to hold his state together as 553,000 Syrian refugees have flooded over the border.

All of which raises profound questions on whether the Middle East as shaped by the British and French during and immediately after the First World War is unravelling.

Some believe it is.

The political order imposed by foreign powers a century ago under the Sykes-Picot Agreement was coming to an end, said the Turkish foreign minister, Ahmet Davutoglu, in a triumphant speech at a university last March, according to the Wall Street Journal’s translation.

“We are now in a new era of restoration,” he said, adding that Turkish influence was returning to areas once under European control.

He was referring to a secret pact struck in 1916 between Sir Mark Sykes of Britain and his French counterpart, François Georges-Picot, to divide Ottoman lands among them.

When the war ended and the Ottoman Empire collapsed, the League of Nations created mandates over territories the imperial powers captured. The British got Transjordan and the mandate for Iraq, where a Sunni minority ruled the Shiites. The French got Syria and Lebanon. The Alawites of Syria — an offshoot of Shiite Islam from which Bashar Assad hails — eventually dominated the Sunni majority.

It was called “the Great Loot,” Anderson writes.

Lawrence was scathing about the British deceit — the Arabs were fighting alongside the British in exchange for independence as Sykes-Picot decided their fate.

“We are calling them (the Arabs) to fight for us on a lie, and I can’t stand it,” he said, according to Anderson’s book.

A century later, the world’s major western powers are hesitant about getting involved in their old colonial stomping grounds — the UN Security Council is divided on Syria.

But Lebanon is fracturing under the pressure of the Syrian war because large communities are mobilized along sectarian lines and “massively invested in the unfolding and outcome of that fight,” Emile Hokayem, author of Syria’s Uprising and the Fracturing of the Levant, said in an interview from Dubai.

“A Lebanese intellectual has said that Lebanon has shrunk to the mountains and Beirut these days,” he said. “The rest of Lebanon, the north, Bekaa and part of the south are integral part of the Syrian conflict.”

But does it mean the colonial borders are being wiped out and states based on religious identity are being created?

Elliott Abrams, former deputy national security adviser to President George W. Bush argued in the Council on Foreign Relations the borders were already gone.

“After all, when Iran can send any amount of arms through Syria and Iraq to its allies and proxies in Lebanon — ignoring the Lebanese government and Lebanese border — what is left of borders?” he wrote.

Others disagree.

Many Arabs are hesitant to break up their countries into mini-states, said Nikolaos van Dam, a retired Dutch diplomat with 35 years of experience in Syria.

“The people in Lebanon and Syria or Iraq, they have a much wider horizon than their own religious community,” he said in an interview from The Hague. “The Alawites, for example, want the whole of Syria under their control, not just a part. Any party that wins will want to be in control of all of Syria.”

In Iraq, the Kurds have thrown the old order off its axis, too.

They got a raw deal after the First World War because the imperial powers made no provision for a Kurdish state; they were scattered among several countries.

In the years following the 2003 American invasion of Iraq, the Kurds established an autonomous region in northern Iraq and are busy building a state.

“As long as they don’t claim it as their own independent state, I think it’s going to work for quite a long time,” said van Dam, adding that declaring outright independence would be disputed by the central government in Baghdad, which does not want to lose territory.

Hokayem said colonial borders may have been imposed on the Arabs, but erasing them and starting anew isn’t the solution. He pointed to the brief unification between Syria and Egypt in 1958, which was a failure.

“Yes, those states were not necessarily organic creations, but over time there is a myth that emerges, a sense of belonging that emerges.”

Whatever happens to the Middle East’s borders, perhaps one aspect has not changed over the last century: an awareness that outside involvement in Syria comes with strings attached.

Whether it is the Russians supporting Assad to keep a toehold in the Middle East or Qatar sending money and arms to rebels in a bid to shape the outcome of the war, Lawrence’s observation in 1916 — and cited in Anderson’s book — applies not just to Western powers but also to Arab ones.

“We have appropriated too many Muslim countries for them to have any real trust in our disinterestedness,” he said.

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